Setting the right foundations to grow and scale
Everything in this section is primarily for managers and business owners.
Here’s an index of this section for quick navigation:
The right strategy and design take much of the work out of sales. Let’s shift gears to explore how you might adjust your approach and offerings to better facilitate sales, revenue, and even organic growth.
Marketing vs. Sales
Sales vs. Marketing are arbitrary terms we’ve made up to delineate roles, responsibilities, and activities in our business. The prospect doesn’t care. It doesn’t mean these terms are insignificant, but it’s important to remember that the lines are often blurred and some sales-related activities or campaigns could also be viewed as marketing, and vice-versa depending on how each organization has drawn those boundaries.
Your prospects are on their own journey. Your sales and marketing efforts are the guide that will help them achieve their desired outcome. They should work in tandem, and teams should avoid pointing fingers or antagonizing the opposing department.
Startup Sales + Customer Discovery/Development
Most startups begin with 80% marketing, 20% sales. Not because that’s the right approach, but because that’s the easy approach. Selling is difficult and we avoid situations and tasks that make us uncomfortable. It’s easier to start with marketing because you don’t have to face direct rejection and can easily fool yourself into feeling productive through busywork. Being busy and being productive aren’t the same.
Instead, if your business is new, you should focus on a sales-heavy approach. Not only because it helps generate the immediate cash flow necessary for survival but because sales help you learn the most about your market and your customers.
If you’re familiar with the Lean Startup methodology, you’ve heard of “Customer Discovery/Development”. Early sales are a form of customer discovery (check out Running Lean by Ash Maurya and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries if you’d like to learn more about it). Many entrepreneurs are comfortable conducting customer discovery interviews, but once they feel the need to sell, they crawl into their defensive shells. The misconception here is that many believe
| Customer Discovery | = | Asking + Listening |
| Sales | = | Telling + Selling |
Truth is, they’re not separate, they’re a continuation. You only happen to stop at asking + listening in the early days because you don’t have anything to sell yet.
The second important thing to realize is that everything doesn’t have to happen in a single interaction/conversation (and often won’t). Once you accept that, the pressure is off the table and you can focus on truly understanding the prospect and receiving feedback.
When doing customer discovery, you’re encouraged to focus on listening not pitching, to learn about what’s in their head before seeding ideas or soliciting feedback. Your objective is to understand their challenges and identify the root cause/motivations of their problems (instead of addressing superficial symptoms). It’s fundamentally the same as the assessment process taught in needs-based selling methodologies.
As a startup, you’re trying to figure out your ideal customer, market, or decision-maker, their buying process, their objections, the main selling points or features of your solution, and the right price for it, etc. There’s no better way to do that than by speaking to a prospect face-to-face and hearing them describe their problems, opinions, objections, and concerns in their own words.
You can’t do that with marketing. It’s more of a 1-sided conversation. If you put out an advertisement and see a lack of success, it’s hard to tell if it’s because of the wrong copy (messaging), because you’re advertising to the wrong audience, or because your solution doesn’t actually solve their problem.
Starting with sales helps you learn more about your prospects and gain the knowledge you need to shape marketing. If you start with a heavy focus on marketing, you’re hitting the ground running with a lot of untested assumptions.
Once you’ve established
- A decent brand reputation,
- Worked out the kinks of problem-solution fit: are you going after the right problem or target customer? Is your solution solving it the right way? Are you using the right messaging and words your prospects resonate with?
- Product-market fit: are you using the right channels? Is there actual and active demand?
- Business model fit: are your unit economics/prices sustainable?
You can then aim to move back towards the ideal 80% marketing, 20% sales ratio (ideal mostly because sales is resource-hungry). When you’ve established a reputation, marketing can do most of the nurturing, qualification, and even conversion (if possible), and you can turn your sales engine into an onboarding/admissions/customer support process.